Taking place a year or two after the reboot, this sequel
catches up with an emotionally and physically scarred Laurie trying to make it
in the world after her ordeal with her murderous brother. Working at a local
coffee shop and self-destructively partying all night, she lives day-by-day.
That is until Michael returns on Halloween to take care of business once more.
Very little in this movie works, and all the poor
decisions Zombie made previously are amplified here. He makes Laurie completely
unlikable via her selfish ways, her horrible language (there should be a
drinking game based around the amount of times she calls someone a “cunt”) and
her general disdain for all her friends that care about her.
It turns out that Loomis isn’t dead, and has written a
biography about Michael Myers which has become a best seller and made him a
millionaire. So when Michael resurfaces his motivation for going after him isn’t
because he cares about anyone he might kill, it’s to protect his reputation.
Way to go RZ, you’ve turned one of cinema’s classic characters into a King Kong
sized assclown.
I can’t fathom why Zombie is so hell bent on making these
characters so loathsome, but he seems to get some sort of perverse pleasure in
doing so. I just wanted Michael to kill everyone so I could go home because I
didn’t give two-shits about anyone here. Wait, I take that back. I will give
him credit for the relationship between Annie (Danielle Harris) and her sheriff
father (Brad Dourif). Their dialogue exchanges are the only natural feeling
scenes in the whole flick, and their performances are outstanding. Danielle
Harris bounces back and shows the audience the range we all knew she had.
Too bad it’s lost among all the garbage going on around her.
Everything else about this movie makes little sense, and
even goes into uber-pretentious territory on occasion. For some random reason
Michael keeps seeing spectral visions of his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie), his
younger self and a white horse. I don’t know what he was trying to say with
these images other than to attempt to be artistic, but it comes off as silly
instead. There are random killings of people for no reason other than they
looked in Michael’s general direction, important characters come and go with no
fanfare and the whole thing feels like it was written on a cocktail napkin at
some dive bar. And yet again he goes the
B-Movie cameos route for no reason (Caroline Williams, Margot Kidder, Sean
Whalen and “Weird” Al Yankovic?!). Oh yeah, didn’t Michael take an entire
revolver’s worth of bullets to his face at the close of the last installment? For
a small chunk of the flick Michael doesn’t wear his mask and there’s no sign of
any damage. I guess continuity doesn’t matter to Zombie, much like in the later
sequels of the original series.
There is also this weird hillbilly thing going on where
everyone, including the main characters, are portrayed as brainless rednecks.
It’s a theme that Zombie has instilled in every one of his films and I don’t
know if he’s attempting to rag on them, is trying to make them more prominent
in cinema or whatever. It’s annoying and it’s worn out its welcome by now.
And what the fuck was up with that ending? Was it trying
to riff on the finale of the Producer’s Cut of Halloween 6? It was nonsensical
in the extreme and was pulled off in the most hackneyed way possible. It
infuriates me thinking back on this that I was excited to see this flick at all
when it was first released, and this ending was the last straw of my patience.
If there was anything decent to say about this flick at all (check the next
paragraph) the ending Zombie devised managed to negate all of it.
I will say that the opening recreation of the hospital
murders from the original Halloween II
was kind of nifty, Michael’s torn up mask that reveals part of his face looks
creepy and the aforementioned Annie/Sheriff Brackett relationship was well
played, but in the end this is just one of those movies that should never had
been made. Zombie had no intentions of making a sequel, and only stepped in
when he heard the Weinsteins were going to make it without his input. He didn’t
want them to “ruin his vision”. If his vision means spitting on his audience
after kicking them in the groin, then he accomplished what he set out to do.
This film now sits as #2 on my “Worst Films of all Time”
list. Way to go Bobby.
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